Sunday, April 29, 2012

But with this weekend and all it gave me - celebration of marriage, old friends, beginnings of good, new friendships, holding hands with a man who cannot speak to me anymore - has come a flood of words, expression.

I am thankful for the songs that will come, giving someone a melody, a song they may not have been able to ever sing themselves.

Here are the pieces.

________________________________

I remember climbing those stairs
But I don't remember seeing you there.
Your dad so elusive; your mother so shy,
It's enough to make the brothers cry
enough to make the brothers cry

*********

Skies of piercing blue cover us
Watch you coming towards your awestruck groom
And I wonder can I hold
such joy in my heart?
I can't contain, cannot contain.

*********
She was so damn beautiful
in that 50s black and white
but now she's gone, and he cannot hold on.

Sunday, April 22, 2012

All too often, conversations begin something like this. "Work" or the physical surroundings of the place we call work, consume our thoughts and our conversations. And why not? It makes sense that a building we drive to or a role we play for 8 hours a day would consume our thoughts.

The world runs on work.

Insurance agents quote a policy. Investors count the cost. Grocers stock the shelves. Farmers grow the food. And without these tasks, this work, many things we take for granted wouldn't get done, or at least, not without us doing each task ourselves.

This makes work sound pretty important. Why, then, is it so often the thorn in our flesh, the source of greatest headache, the stealer of sleep?

Because once, all at once, work became toil. God, speaking to man in a garden where perfect relationship with the Maker was just broken: "...getting food from the ground will be as painful as having babies is for your wife; you'll be working in pain all your life long. ...you'll get your food the hard way... sweating in the fields from dawn to dusk." (excerpts from Genesis 3: 17-19, The Message)

Toil can be described as "hard and continuous work" or "exhausting labor or effort". Even, "battle, strife, struggle". (from dictionary.com)

Now, this sounds more like what many of us describe as how we feel about work.

How, then, can we encourage work? How can we who live in urban centers with so much poverty and laziness, look at the men on front porches day in and day out with a Colt 45 in their hands and say, "Go to work, you sluggard!" (does anyone really say sluggard?) while we so often feel that our own work is battle and strife and struggle?

Monday, April 2, 2012

Many have visited the Malcomb House; still many more have not [yet]. We've had different names and faces stay for different lengths of time - days, weeks, months, more than a year. Now, we are a house of 5 (you read that right; and 3 bedrooms, 1 full bathroom... and 5 people).

We're always navigating space - where to store things, the discipline of putting things away, and how to just find a way to read and breathe and think without tripping over each other. And yet we're still thankful for the space to be together - to pray, to eat, to notice. Easy? No. Good? Yes. It takes energy and even more grace, yet still we're growing in our life together.